April 03, 2013

To no one’s surprise a Zionist claque has swiftly assembled
to denounce the findings of the Fraser vs UCU Employment Tribunal. It would
appear that according to these voices the only business a the next meeting of
UCU’s national executive will not be fighting the massive cuts in UK higher and
further education but debating when and in what format to reissue The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Hysterical rubbish, of course but we have to explore why the
reaction is so unbalanced. Fraser and his legal advisors chose the legal
terrain and the scope of their action, not UCU. They chose their schedule of
witnesses who declaimed and dissembled but failed to address the matters that
Fraser wished the tribunal to consider.

Anthony White, counsel for UCU,
demolished their testimony but was only able to do so with such effectiveness
because they were such poor witnesses. Ever since the tribunal, Fraser’s
self-proclaimed friends have been picking over 50 pages of closely argued legal
findings trying to claim they are simultaneously technically narrow and the
most wide-ranging antisemitic text of recent years.

Hirsh and Susskind et al fail to grasp at least two very
basic points. They solipsistically believe it is all about the Jews; they cannot
understand or believe that it is about the Palestinians.

For the vast majority
of those active in support of Palestinian rights it was the oppression of
Palestinians that led them to activity. They only started to consider Zionism as
an ideology when they started to enquire why Israel was behaving so badly and so
criminally. At that point they encountered the Zionist justification for
occupation and oppression and took a stance of either deploring the degradation
of a potentially positive movement or took a more radical stance of identifying
Zionist ideology, in itself, at the heart of the problem.

The absence of the
Palestinians even as objects, let alone actors, in the Zionist exclusionary
Jewish narrative tells us all we need to know about why being anti-Zionist is
radically different from being an anti-Semite. Anti-Zionism is a stance against
a pernicious anti-Palestinian racism. Zionism is an ideology that allows Israel to behave as it does while simultaneously
believing that Israel
conforms to the norms of liberal, law-based democracy.

Secondly, they continually ask, ‘why only boycott Israel?’ The Palestinian call for BDS is the only extant call for boycott by a
significant national liberation movement. Other movements and peoples call for
different forms of support each of which must be considered on its merits.

Israel’s crimes are not measured on a Richter scale of oppression against
those of China or Burma or Zimbabwe and only be the subject of campaigns when
they reach the hotly contested pinnacle at the top of the Premiership of abuse. That the crimes are profound and continuing is a sufficient justification.

Other regimes are the subject of regular denunciation and sanction by western
governments, Israel is
singled out not by our opposition but by the condoning of its actions by the USA; its
massive military and civil aid; and its systematic cover at the Security
Council. Similarly the EU treats Israel,
in defiance of geography, as a surrogate, if displaced, part of Europe and grants the privileges of association without
requiring the fulfilment of Council of Europe human rights standards.

None of this is deny the possibility, and occasional
reality, of support for Palestinian rights being motivated by malice towards
Jews. We have a duty to criticise and condemn such behaviour when we see it and
the Palestinian rights movement is, in general, self-aware and self critical on
this. Fraser and his team were unable to discover any such motivation behind
the actions of UCU officers and activists and are now reduced to asserting that
its absence can only be the result of a wider collaboration to conceal it. Such
concealment is beyond the limited ability of UCU, PSC, BRICUP, the Employment
Tribunal Service or other presumed conspirators. Its absence is just that, an
absence.

Mike Cushman is a
member of BRICUP and is a UCU branch secretary and a regular speaker in favour
of Palestinian rights at successive UCU congresses. His interventions were
regularly referred to by Fraser and his witnesses.